Presently, most personal computers are shipped with a pre-partitioned hard disk drive (disk), with the disk typically having one volume spanning the entire disk. In certain situations, however, another partitioning arrangement is needed. Full-volume encryption is one example of when another partition is needed, namely to provide a recovery partition. Another example is when a user (or administrator) desires to split up a single volume into multiple volumes, such as to cleanly separate certain data.
If another partition is needed, the user needs to back up the volume contents, re-partition the disk as desired and then restore the volume contents. This is a very time-consuming (expensive) and arduous process, and may even risk data loss for users who improperly backup or restore their data.